Revealing The Invisible

How Our Hidden Behaviors Are Becoming The Most Valuable Commodity Of The 21st Century

On the precipice of change

The world is at the precipice of one of the most dramatic shifts in history, the transition from an industrial society to one that is based on a deep understanding of an entirely new form of knowledge capital, behavior; our behaviors as well as those of the intelligent machines that we are building.

Although revealing our behaviors may conjure up images of Minority Report and 1984 the reality is that a new kind of value is emerging that has the power to profoundly transform our lives, our economy, and our businesses—from personalized medicine and autonomous advocates, to hyper-personalized products and loyal brands that know what you need before you know to ask for it.

And it’s not just human behaviors that are being captured and analyzed. AI powered autonomous vehicles, smart devices, algorithms, and intelligent machines will all exhibit behaviors. In this very near future every person and digital device will have its own digital-self—a digital twin which knows more about us than we know about ourselves. These intelligent objects will communicate with each other across vast digital ecosystems, creating a level of collaboration and transparency we can barely imagine today. Your digital-self will be one of your most valuable assets, requiring radical new technologies and approaches for how you own, protect, and share your digital behaviors.

Far-fetched? Only if you discount the enormous power of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, which will use the invisible patterns in all of our behaviors to develop an intimate understand of what drives, us, where we see value, and how we want to experience the world.

Fascinating, engaging, and incredibly timely, Revealing the Invisible provides a front row seat to the future of business and our lives in the 21st Century.

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The challenge of artificial intelligence isn’t so much the technology as this. Listen as Tom shares the story of ill-fated Air France 447 and how it can teach us about the deep cultural flaw that stands in the way of artificial intelligence.

Thomas Koulopoulos, Author

Thomas Koulopoulos is the Chairman and Founder of Delphi Group, a 30-year-old global think tank which advises F500 companies and governments. He is the author of ten prior books, past director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, an adjunct professor at Boston University, a columnist for Inc.com, and Founding Partner of Acroventures, an investment and advisory firm focusing on AI.

George Achillias, Author

George Achillias, MBA is a digital strategist focusing on AI led human-machine ecosystems. He leads strategy at an AI-focused investment fund and technology agency in Europe and works with FTSE250 companies to define their role, products and services in a decentralized blockchain-driven world.

"Revealing the Invisible is one of a kind in an important way: while there are plenty of "show me the future" books, there aren't enough "here's how to think about it, and here's how to profit from it." This is one of those books: while spending some time on important disruptive trends (artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, n-of-one manufacturing and targeting) it takes the time to work through the implications to our approaches to products, marketing and sales. Embrace it!"

"Revealing the Invisible is a smart and entertaining look into an important shift in our economy and society: our behavior is getting digitized, which means that everything we buy and use can be personalized based on knowledge of what we do. Thomas Koulopoulos guides the reader through the surprising repercussions of this move from an economy of mass production to one where the consumer is surrounded by objects and services that are getting a lot smarter and adapting themselves to the individual."

Chris NicholsonCEO Skymind

"Revealing the Invisible is a uniquely eye-opening look at the future, offering not only insight to a world hidden in plain sight – but also providing a framework for seeing how we can embrace AI and make it part of our human tissue. We built it and we can expand our horizons with it. Do not fear that which we do not yet know – greet it as a golden pathway to the future."

"An invaluable perspective on the promise and the challenge of a future driven by intelligent machines."

Dan HoeyerCEO Leaders Excellence

"Not since Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat has an author so skillfully described the challenges and opportunities of 21st Century technology."

Barry P. Chaiken, MD MPHCEO DocsNetwork, Ltd.

Self-driving cars. Precision medicine. Every moment and movement of your day recorded and analyzed. Orwellian dystopia or a Shakespearean brave new world? Thomas Koulopoulos and George Achillias dissect the present and envision the future. A most enticing read!"

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Behavioral Business

The industrial era depersonalized the individual. We each became part of a demographic, a generation, a consumer grouping, a Nielsen rating. We can no longer think of markets as anonymous categories defined by crude demographics. Anytown USA, where the average family, in an average house, lived with 2½ above average children, was a fiction we created to make up for the fact that we could not understand the behaviors and needs of each individual.

No longer.

Disruptive new technologies are already being used to collect and understand our once invisible behaviors, giving us unimagined insight into our lives across a vast new digital ecosystem of social media, mobile devices, wearables, and embedded sensors. All of this is creating an opportunity to deliver hyper-personalized products and experiences for each individual that provide enduring and sustainable value.

Artificial Intelligence

It’s not just human behaviors that are being captured and analyzed. In the very near future every person and digital device will have its own digital-self—a digital twin which can communicate, interact, and collaborate with other digital entities. Autonomous vehicles, smart devices, and intelligent machines will all exhibit their own behaviors. They will learn and evolve to better understand complex patterns in how the world behaves that are otherwise invisible to us.

But we fear AI. It’s what Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has referred to as “Summoning the demon.” In this book, we’ll attempt to dispel the fear that often accompanies AI. In fact, our objective is to prove that we need AI as an indispensable collaborator and that the risk of not having it is far greater than any threat it poses.

Autonomous Devices

One of the areas where so much of what we’ll talk about will be most obvious is in the evolution of autonomous devices, and most notably autonomous vehicles. Transportation is the greatest artifact of the industrial age. Nothing has fueled commerce, urbanization, and automation more than the vehicles that transport us, our goods, and our raw materials. It’s also the greatest contributor to carbon emissions, the leading cause of death, and one of the most inefficient uses of capital for the individual owner.

At the same time, we’ve bought into a model of what a car should be and how its value is measured. From the notion of strapping ourselves into a cockpit, to the legroom defined (and constrained) by a forward-facing passenger configuration, to the head-bobbing suspension of a high-performance sports car, we value a car based on preconceived notions of what we should want.

The single greatest impact of autonomous vehicles will be in how they redefine our notion of what a car is, how it should be used, and how it behaves, while also remobilizing the world for efficient, safe, and ecologically sustainable transportation of ten billion people, most of whom would have no access to the current and historical model of what a car should be.

Digital Ecosystems

The industrial era created engines of production that were laden with inefficiency. Like large gears grinding against each other in the boiler room of an enormous ocean liner, commerce wasn’t pretty or easy. It required constant manual intervention and created friction in the form of convoluted processes, regulations, middlemen, and brokers that we simply accepted as part of the way an industrial society worked. Turning these vessels around to navigate new markets and meet new needs was about as responsive and effective as steering the Titanic—at full throttle in the dark—clear of an iceberg. Incumbent companies in large established industries would stare at the future high upon their crow’s nest asking, “Why isn’t she turning?” as they braced for an unavoidable impact.

Worse yet, we built entire industries to employ people whose jobs depended on the existence and inefficiency of friction—financial institutions, government regulatory bodies, agents, and middlemen whose purpose was not to reduce friction but to live off its heat.

The industrial era model was not built for today’s digital technologies or marketplace. Increasingly complex coordination of business partner networks, excessive regulation, an inability to adapt quickly, and cumbersome customer experiences have created an opportunity of immense scale to drive out friction by creating entirely new digital ecosystems focused specifically on the needs of each individual.

A SIMPLE MIND GAME THAT DRIVES HOME JUST HOW FAST TECHNOLOGY IS ACCELERATING _

We’re not wired to think exponentially, and this trivial thought experiment will prove just how hard it is.